MCCAFFERY: Sixers stand pat at trade deadline, sealing their fate

Thursday, February 21, 2013

PHILADELPHIA — The NBA trade deadline passed Thursday, and so did the 76ers. Fortunately for them, they are half-run by a former cruise-ship executive, so they should be comfortable with tugging something back to dry land.

Though they had been busy on the hand-held devices, the Sixers could find nothing appealing enough to make them budge off of a roster than has left them at 22-30. So they will play the final 30 games with about what they have, meaning one thing: That confetti-spraying device they activate after victories won’t be suffering much depreciation.

They are badly injured, down three projected starters. But they never were built correctly, even if they did rent the Constitution Center last summer to tout their rotisserie-basketball methods and successes. Now, when the games are for real, they barely score.

“I don’t know what else to say,” Doug Collins told reporters after a 94-87 loss the other night in Minneapolis, before channeling Charles Barkley. “It was terrible — no energy, no life at all. It was terrible. I can’t candy-coat it any more than that.”

That tune is familiar, with Collins not hesitant to share his exasperation with a roster that looks like a bulletin board — something tacked here, something else stapled there, something falling down, something yellowed, something covering something else up. Without Thad Young, who is nearing a return, the playing rotation is a scrambled mess. Andrew Bynum, who is about to become a four-decades-long punchline in Philadelphia sports radio, could help. But by then it will probably be too late.

That’s why they needed to do something at the deadline.

After just having had the All-Star break off, the Sixers had an optional workout Thursday at PCOM, closed to the press. Meanwhile, a source was confirming that the executives were talking about this, about that, about whatever might be available at the deadline, but that nothing was imminent.

Turns out, nothing was imminent.

Now what? More tee-shirts in that machine gun they point into an oft-uncrowded upper deck?

Since the Sixers remain expertly coached, they can generate a late-season playoff push. But the team they most likely would have to catch, the Milwaukee Bucks, snagged shooter J.J. Redick at the deadline, an indication that one team was more serious about the race than the other.

Evidently, there was nothing nothing more appealing for the Sixers at the buzzer than running this season into the dirt and then having nearly $30 million to spray on free agents in the offseason. So now they are left with one option that could turn catastrophic off the court, and maybe on it, too. That would be to insult the customers by luring them into the Wells Fargo Center with the promise of Bynum. Though the center has not dressed all season, he keeps threatening to play. And why not? He will be a free agent at the end of the season, so he can use some portion of the fractured Sixers’ season as his personal resume-fluffier. Technically, the Sixers were OK with that arrangement. They would use Bynum, he would use them, and if they found the simultaneous-using workable, they would agree to some longer-term arrangement. If not, they would part and the Sixers would bank the salary-cap relief.

Not in that unwritten agreement, though, was the obligation for the Sixers to play Bynum late in a lost season for his benefit only. And Bynum is likely to pronounce himself fit for NBA basketball just in time for it not to matter to the team that had just paid him $16.8 million. If so, he won’t make one trip down the floor without being booed. And won’t that play well on the national cable networks?

If they have any self respect, the Sixers will wait until Bynum was in uniform, then forget to put him in a game.

But that’s later. Now, it is the world-champion Heat coming in Saturday, and the chance for the Sixers to show that, were they to be a playoff team, they wouldn’t be embarrassed in the 1-vs.-8 first round.